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Wednesday, 28 January 2015

January 23rd
Check out our new art display! These are our warm and cool snowmen. After looking at and discussing the colour wheel, the students had to choose either four warm colours or four cool colours for their snowman's background.

I invited M Campeau, the grade 4/5 French teacher at our school, and his class, to come and visit our class on Friday. M Campeau is a drummer and he came to share his expertise! He had many exciting stories to share and facts to tell us that extended our learning and understanding of hearing and sound. After a great discussion, M Campeau brought out all of his instruments to share with us, and we had a "jam" session. It was so fun!

Saturday, 24 January 2015

We had such a great day on Thursday. All four of the grade three classes spent the entire afternoon exploring many hands-on activities related to our study of hearing and sound.
Some of the stations included:

Tin Can Telephones

Kazoos

"Guess That Sound" game

Musical instruments and vibrating rice!

Elastic Band/Shoe box "string" instruments

Here's a picture collage of some of the fun and great learning that took place!

A big Thank You to all of our parent volunteers for coming to help us with this.

Friday, 23 January 2015

We are so lucky to have had a guest come and do Henna with us. Frances is mom to one of our students, so this was very exciting! Frances, a Henna artist, also makes the Henna herself! This afternoon tied in perfectly with our study of celebrations and traditions in India.
Here are a few of the pictures of the super artwork that Frances did for the students.

Applying the Henna

Here are the before (the day of) and after (the next day) of the Henna designs. Once the henna has dried the black paint washes off, what is left is a "stain" that will last approximately two weeks.

Here is a link to a website with more information about Henna. Art is Fun

While Frances was painting the Henna on each of the students the rest of us read this great book, Nadia's Hands by Karen English. You can click on the book to read a "Goodreads" summary.

Saturday, 17 January 2015

We were investigating the fact that sound is made when things move. The movement is called vibration, and vibrations make sound! When vibrations are small the sound is quiet. When something makes a big vibration the sound is loud. We also discovered that the faster an object vibrates the higher the pitch is. The sound waves are moving faster. We noticed that the slower an object vibrates the lower the pitch is, the sound waves are moving more slowly.

Experiment #1 ~ Elastic Band test.
We placed an elastic band between our fingers. We plucked the elastic band to make a sound. We could see, feel, and hear the vibration! We tried rubber bands of different widths to see if they would make a different sound. They did! We also tried wrapping the elastic bands around books, our chairs, and pencil boxes and when we plucked them they made different sounds! Some students put several elastics together and strummed them like a guitar! Very cool!

Experiment #2 ~ Ruler test.
We placed a ruler over the edge our our desks. We pushed down quickly on the ruler and watched it move up and down. We tried different lengths sticking out over the edge and noticed that the ruler vibrated and made different sounds depending on how far over the desk the ruler was hanging. The shorter the ruler was hanging over, the higher the pitch, the faster the vibration. The farther the ruler was hanging over, the lower the pitch, the slower the vibration was.

We also read parts of this great book from our own school library. Simple Science Sound by Mike and Maria Gordon.

Thursday Jan, 15th
The weather finally cooperated and we were able to get out to try cross country skiing. We had so much fun. Thank you to all of the parents who volunteered to come and help us get our skis tied up and put on!

January 10th

In Social Studies we are studying four countries: India, Ukraine, Peru and Tunisia. We have been using our mapping skills to locate these countries on the world map. We have labeled the countries, discussed the continents that they are on and talked about the capital cities. We are also working on a project on the Chromebooks finding each of the flags for the four countries.

One Geology World MapThis great interactive map helped us find the answers to our questions about location and capital cities. If you click on the country you are taken to another page with a closer view. We were able to use our mapping skills to look at the legends and find the capital cities. Click on the link if you'd like to give it a try!